PREFIXED to the second volume of Mr. Forster’s admirable biography of
Walter Savage Landor, {519} is an engraving from a portrait of that
remarkable man when seventy-seven years of age, by Boxall. The writer of
these lines can testify that the original picture is a singularly good
likeness, the result of close and subtle observation on the part of the
painter; but, for this very reason, the engraving gives a most inadequate
idea of the merit of the picture and the character of the man.
From the engraving, the arms and hands are omitted. In the picture, they
are, as they were in nature, indispensable to a correct reading of the
vigorous face. The arms were very peculiar. They were rather short, and
were curiously restrained and checked in their action at the elbows; in
the action of the hands, even when separately clenched, there was the
same kind of pause, and a noticeable tendency to relaxation on the part
of the thumb. Let the face be never so intense or fierce, there was a
commentary of gentleness in the hands, essential to be taken along with
it. Like Hamlet, Landor would speak daggers, but use none. In the
expression of his hands, though angrily closed, there was always
gentleness and tenderness; just as when they were open, and the handsome
old gentleman would wave them with a little courtly flourish that sat
well upon him, as he recalled some classic compliment that he had
rendered to some reigning Beauty, there was a chivalrous grace about them
such as pervades his softer verses. Thus the fictitious Mr. Boythorn (to
whom we may refer without impropriety in this connexion, as Mr. Forster
does) declaims “with unimaginable energy” the while his bird is “perched
upon his thumb”, and he “softly smooths its feathers with his
forefinger”.
From the spirit of Mr. Forster’s Biography these characteristic hands are
never omitted, and hence (apart from its literary merits) its great
value. As the same masterly writer’s _Life and Times of Oliver
Goldsmith_ is a generous and yet conscientious picture of a period, so
this is a not less generous and yet conscientious picture of one life; of
a life, with all its aspirations, achievements, and disappointments; all
its capabilities, opportunities, and irretrievable mistakes. It is
essentially a sad book, and herein lies proof of its truth and worth.
The life of almost any man possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to
himself; and this book enables us not only to see its subject, but to be
its subject, if we will.
Mr. Forster is of opinion that “Landor’s fame very surely awaits him”.
This point admitted or doubted, the value of the book remains the same.
It needs not to know his works (otherwise than through his biographer’s
exposition), it needs not to have known himself, to find a deep interest
in these pages. More or less of their warning is in every conscience;
and some admiration of a fine genius, and of a great, wild, generous
nature, incapable of mean self-extenuation or dissimulation—if unhappily
incapable of self-repression too—should be in every breast. “There may
be still living many persons”, Walter Landor’s brother, Robert, writes to
Mr. Forster of this book, “who would contradict any narrative of yours in
which the best qualities were remembered, the worst forgotten.” Mr.
Forster’s comment is: “I had not waited for this appeal to resolve, that,
if this memoir were written at all, it should contain, as far as might
lie within my power, a fair statement of the truth”. And this eloquent
passage of truth immediately follows: “Few of his infirmities are without
something kindly or generous about them; and we are not long in
discovering there is nothing so wildly incredible that he will not
himself in perfect good faith believe. When he published his first book
of poems on quitting Oxford, the profits were to be reserved for a
distressed clergyman. When he published his Latin poems, the poor of
Leipzig were to have the sum they realised. When his comedy was ready to
be acted, a Spaniard who had sheltered him at Castro was to be made
richer by it. When he competed for the prize of the Academy of
Stockholm, it was to go to the poor of Sweden. If nobody got anything
from any one of these enterprises, the fault at all events was not his.
With his extraordinary power of forgetting disappointments, he was
prepared at each successive failure to start afresh, as if each had been
a triumph. I shall have to delineate this peculiarity as strongly in the
last half as in the first half of his life, and it was certainly an
amiable one. He was ready at all times to set aside, out of his own
possessions, something for somebody who might please him for the time;
and when frailties of temper and tongue are noted, this other
eccentricity should not be omitted. He desired eagerly the love as well
as the good opinion of those whom for the time he esteemed, and no one
was more affectionate while under such influences. It is not a small
virtue to feel such genuine pleasure, as he always did in giving and
receiving pleasure. His generosity, too, was bestowed chiefly on those
who could make small acknowledgment in thanks and no return in kind.”
Some of his earlier contemporaries may have thought him a vain man. Most
assuredly he was not, in the common acceptation of the term. A vain man
has little or no admiration to bestow upon competitors. Landor had an
inexhaustible fund. He thought well of his writings, or he would not
have preserved them. He said and wrote that he thought well of them,
because that was his mind about them, and he said and wrote his mind. He
was one of the few men of whom you might always know the whole: of whom
you might always know the worst, as well as the best. He had no
reservations or duplicities. “No, by Heaven!” he would say (“with
unimaginable energy”), if any good adjective were coupled with him which
he did not deserve: “I am nothing of the kind. I wish I were; but I
don’t deserve the attribute, and I never did, and I never shall!” His
intense consciousness of himself never led to his poorly excusing
himself, and seldom to his violently asserting himself. When he told
some little story of his bygone social experiences, in Florence, or where
not, as he was fond of doing, it took the innocent form of making all the
interlocutors, Landors. It was observable, too, that they always called
him “Mr. Landor”—rather ceremoniously and submissively. There was a
certain “Caro Pádre Abáte Marina”—invariably so addressed in these
anecdotes—who figured through a great many of them, and who always
expressed himself in this deferential tone.
Mr. Forster writes of Landor’s character thus:
“A man must be judged, at first, by what he says and does. But with
him such extravagance as I have referred to was little more than the
habitual indulgence (on such themes) of passionate feelings and
language, indecent indeed but utterly purposeless; the mere explosion
of wrath provoked by tyranny or cruelty; the irregularities of an
overheated steam-engine too weak for its own vapour. It is very
certain that no one could detest oppression more truly than Landor
did in all seasons and times; and if no one expressed that scorn,
that abhorrence of tyranny and fraud, more hastily or more
intemperately, all his fire and fury signified really little else
than ill-temper too easily provoked. Not to justify or excuse such
language, but to explain it, this consideration is urged. If not
uniformly placable, Landor was always compassionate. He was
tender-hearted rather than bloody-minded at all times, and upon only
the most partial acquaintance with his writings could other opinion
be formed. A completer knowledge of them would satisfy any one that
he had as little real disposition to kill a king as to kill a mouse.
In fact there is not a more marked peculiarity in his genius than the
union with its strength of a most uncommon gentleness, and in the
personal ways of the man this was equally manifest.”—Vol. i. p. 496.
Of his works, thus:
“Though his mind was cast in the antique mould, it had opened itself
to every kind of impression through a long and varied life; he has
written with equal excellence in both poetry and prose, which can
hardly be said of any of his contemporaries; and perhaps the single
epithet by which his books would be best described is that reserved
exclusively for books not characterised only by genius, but also by
special individuality. They are unique. Having possessed them, we
should miss them. Their place would be supplied by no others. They
have that about them, moreover, which renders it almost certain that
they will frequently be resorted to in future time. There are none
in the language more quotable. Even where impulsiveness and want of
patience have left them most fragmentary, this rich compensation is
offered to the reader. There is hardly a conceivable subject, in
life or literature, which they do not illustrate by striking
aphorisms, by concise and profound observations, by wisdom ever
applicable to the deeds of men, and by wit as available for their
enjoyment. Nor, above all, will there anywhere be found a more
pervading passion for liberty, a fiercer hatred of the base, a wider
sympathy with the wronged and the oppressed, or help more ready at
all times for those who fight at odds and disadvantage against the
powerful and the fortunate, than in the writings of Walter Savage
Landor.”—Last page of second volume.
The impression was strong upon the present writer’s mind, as on Mr.
Forster’s, during years of close friendship with the subject of this
biography, that his animosities were chiefly referable to the singular
inability in him to dissociate other people’s ways of thinking from his
own. He had, to the last, a ludicrous grievance (both Mr. Forster and
the writer have often amused themselves with it) against a good-natured
nobleman, doubtless perfectly unconscious of having ever given him
offence. The offence was, that on the occasion of some dinner party in
another nobleman’s house, many years before, this innocent lord (then a
commoner) had passed in to dinner, through some door, before him, as he
himself was about to pass in through that same door with a lady on his
arm. Now, Landor was a gentleman of most scrupulous politeness, and in
his carriage of himself towards ladies there was a certain mixture of
stateliness and deference, belonging to quite another time, and, as Mr.
Pepys would observe, “mighty pretty to see”. If he could by any effort
imagine himself committing such a high crime and misdemeanour as that in
question, he could only imagine himself as doing it of a set purpose,
under the sting of some vast injury, to inflict a great affront. A
deliberately designed affront on the part of another man, it therefore
remained to the end of his days. The manner in which, as time went on,
he permeated the unfortunate lord’s ancestry with this offence, was
whimsically characteristic of Landor. The writer remembers very well
when only the individual himself was held responsible in the story for
the breach of good breeding; but in another ten years or so, it began to
appear that his father had always been remarkable for ill manners; and in
yet another ten years or so, his grandfather developed into quite a
prodigy of coarse behaviour.
Mr. Boythorn—if he may again be quoted—said of his adversary, Sir
Leicester Dedlock: “That fellow is, _and his father was_, _and his
grandfather was_, the most stiff-necked, arrogant, imbecile, pig-headed
numskull, ever, by some inexplicable mistake of Nature, born in any
station of life but a walking-stick’s!”
The strength of some of Mr. Landor’s most captivating kind qualities was
traceable to the same source. Knowing how keenly he himself would feel
the being at any small social disadvantage, or the being unconsciously
placed in any ridiculous light, he was wonderfully considerate of shy
people, or of such as might be below the level of his usual conversation,
or otherwise out of their element. The writer once observed him in the
keenest distress of mind in behalf of a modest young stranger who came
into a drawing-room with a glove on his head. An expressive commentary
on this sympathetic condition, and on the delicacy with which he advanced
to the young stranger’s rescue, was afterwards furnished by himself at a
friendly dinner at Gore House, when it was the most delightful of houses.
His dress—say, his cravat or shirt-collar—had become slightly disarranged
on a hot evening, and Count D’Orsay laughingly called his attention to
the circumstance as we rose from table. Landor became flushed, and
greatly agitated: “My dear Count D’Orsay, I thank you! My dear Count
D’Orsay, I thank you from my soul for pointing out to me the abominable
condition to which I am reduced! If I had entered the Drawing-room, and
presented myself before Lady Blessington in so absurd a light, I would
have instantly gone home, put a pistol to my head, and blown my brains
out!”
Mr. Forster tells a similar story of his keeping a company waiting
dinner, through losing his way; and of his seeing no remedy for that
breach of politeness but cutting his throat, or drowning himself, unless
a countryman whom he met could direct him by a short road to the house
where the party were assembled. Surely these are expressive notes on the
gravity and reality of his explosive inclinations to kill kings!
His manner towards boys was charming, and the earnestness of his wish to
be on equal terms with them and to win their confidence was quite
touching. Few, reading Mr. Forster’s book, can fall to see in this, his
pensive remembrance of that “studious wilful boy at once shy and
impetuous”, who had not many intimacies at Rugby, but who was “generally
popular and respected, and used his influence often to save the younger
boys from undue harshness or violence”. The impulsive yearnings of his
passionate heart towards his own boy, on their meeting at Bath, after
years of separation, likewise burn through this phase of his character.
But a more spiritual, softened, and unselfish aspect of it, was to
derived from his respectful belief in happiness which he himself had
missed. His marriage had not been a felicitous one—it may be fairly
assumed for either side—but no trace of bitterness or distrust concerning
other marriages was in his mind. He was never more serene than in the
midst of a domestic circle, and was invariably remarkable for a perfectly
benignant interest in young couples and young lovers. That, in his
ever-fresh fancy, he conceived in this association innumerable histories
of himself involving far more unlikely events that never happened than
Isaac D’Israeli ever imagined, is hardly to be doubted; but as to this
part of his real history he was mute, or revealed his nobleness in an
impulse to be generously just. We verge on delicate ground, but a slight
remembrance rises in the writer which can grate nowhere. Mr. Forster
relates how a certain friend, being in Florence, sent him home a leaf
from the garden of his old house at Fiesole. That friend had first asked
him what he should send him home, and he had stipulated for this
gift—found by Mr. Forster among his papers after his death. The friend,
on coming back to England, related to Landor that he had been much
embarrassed, on going in search of the leaf, by his driver’s suddenly
stopping his horses in a narrow lane, and presenting him (the friend) to
“La Signora Landora”. The lady was walking alone on a bright
Italian-winter-day; and the man, having been told to drive to the Villa
Landora, inferred that he must be conveying a guest or visitor. “I
pulled off my hat,” said the friend, “apologised for the coachman’s
mistake, and drove on. The lady was walking with a rapid and firm step,
had bright eyes, a fine fresh colour, and looked animated and agreeable.”
Landor checked off each clause of the description, with a stately nod of
more than ready assent, and replied, with all his tremendous energy
concentrated into the sentence: “And the Lord forbid that I should do
otherwise than declare that she always WAS agreeable—to every one but
_me_!”
Mr. Forster step by step builds up the evidence on which he writes this
life and states this character. In like manner, he gives the evidence
for his high estimation of Landor’s works, and—it may be added—for their
recompense against some neglect, in finding so sympathetic, acute, and
devoted a champion. Nothing in the book is more remarkable than his
examination of each of Landor’s successive pieces of writing, his
delicate discernment of their beauties, and his strong desire to impart
his own perceptions in this wise to the great audience that is yet to
come. It rarely befalls an author to have such a commentator: to become
the subject of so much artistic skill and knowledge, combined with such
infinite and loving pains. Alike as a piece of Biography, and as a
commentary upon the beauties of a great writer, the book is a massive
book; as the man and the writer were massive too. Sometimes, when the
balance held by Mr. Forster has seemed for a moment to turn a little
heavily against the infirmities of temperament of a grand old friend, we
have felt something of a shock; but we have not once been able to gainsay
the justice of the scales. This feeling, too, has only fluttered out of
the detail, here or there, and has vanished before the whole. We fully
agree with Mr. Forster that “judgment has been passed”—as it should
be—“with an equal desire to be only just on all the qualities of his
temperament which affected necessarily not his own life only. But, now
that the story is told, no one will have difficulty in striking the
balance between its good and ill; and what was really imperishable in
Landor’s genius will not be treasured less, or less understood, for the
more perfect knowledge of his character”.
Mr. Forster’s second volume gives a facsimile of Landor’s writing at
seventy-five. It may be interesting to those who are curious in
calligraphy, to know that its resemblance to the recent handwriting of
that great genius, M. Victor Hugo, is singularly strong.
In a military burial-ground in India, the name of Walter Landor is
associated with the present writer’s over the grave of a young officer.
No name could stand there, more inseparably associated in the writer’s
mind with the dignity of generosity: with a noble scorn of all
littleness, all cruelty, oppression, fraud, and false pretence.
ADDRESS WHICH APPEARED SHORTLY PREVIOUS TO THE COMPLETION OF THE
TWENTIETH VOLUME (1868), INTIMATING A NEW SERIES OF “ALL THE YEAR ROUND”
I BEG to announce to the readers of this Journal, that on the completion
of the Twentieth Volume on the Twenty-eighth of November, in the present
year, I shall commence an entirely New Series of _All the Year Round_.
The change is not only due to the convenience of the public (with which a
set of such books, extending beyond twenty large volumes, would be quite
incompatible), but is also resolved upon for the purpose of effecting
some desirable improvements in respect of type, paper, and size of page,
which could not otherwise be made. To the Literature of the New Series
it would not become me to refer, beyond glancing at the pages of this
Journal, and of its predecessor, through a score of years; inasmuch as my
regular fellow-labourers and I will be at our old posts, in company with
those younger comrades, whom I have had the pleasure of enrolling from
time to time, and whose number it is always one of my pleasantest
editorial duties to enlarge.
As it is better that every kind of work honestly undertaken and
discharged, should speak for itself than be spoken for, I will only
remark further on one intended omission in the New Series. The Extra
Christmas Number has now been so extensively, and regularly, and often
imitated, that it is in very great danger of becoming tiresome. I have
therefore resolved (though I cannot add, willingly) to abolish it, at the
highest tide of its success.